Abolish the Sunday Trading laws

As readers will know, I don’t normally feature my day to day work on this blog. However, occasionally there are exceptions where the libertarian aims of Crash Bang Wallace and the output of my day job overlap.

4 Responses

johnd2008:

Until I retired, I worked shifts year round including all Public Holidays. There is no way I wanted to go back to normal working hours. Family life adapts to suit and children soon learn that Dad cannot be there as he is working. The stupidity of Sunday trading law means that I cannot buy certain things from Tesco,yet I can go to the village shop at almost any hour and buy what I need. It is time that Government and the churches got out of our lives and leave us free to pick and choose what we buy and when.

Sunday should be an enforced day of rest – what is so great about work that you want to do it 24/7? Allowing people to opt out of resting on Sundays they will be coerced into working Sundays even if they do not want to do so. Even the most able and best paid can be coerced. Junior doctors in the NHS are all made to sign a “voluntary” exemption from the European Working Hours Directive so that they can enjoy 80 hour weeks and risk the lives of their patients.

Johnd2008 seems to be offering a selfish argument, OK, he doesnt care about people having a guaranteed rest day and the opportunity to be with their families. But people need this protection, it would have helped him probably, he clearly hasn’t read any of the research on the effects of absent fathers.

For the last 25 years of my working life, I worked shifts. Yes, there were times when they clashed with my social and family life, but being around during the day when my sons were off school for holidays more than made up for that. It also helped that my sons learned that life could not revolve around them and have grown up to be well rounded adults . The point I have tried to make is that modern life requires a constant supply of any number of things like electricity and water.The people who supply these things manage to live reasonable lives and I am sure that shop workers can also do it even working on Sundays.